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German Intellectuals, Unification, and National Identity
ation. The Left fundamentally suspected all kinds of conservatism,
capitalism, and nationalism of harbouring fascism. The Right, in
turn, accused the Left of advocating totalitarian policies because of
their commitment to Communism, which was regarded as the secret
blood brother of National Socialism. Interestingly, both accusations
were couched in terms of the past.
Müller pays particular attention to biographical and age-group
experiences. At the beginning he points out with some astonishment
that on the German side the arguments and positions in the debate
around unification hardly referred to their historical dimension. In
short, what has been lacking so far is a deciphering of the genealogy
of the discourses, a ‘tracing back’ of intellectual paths. If, like Müller,
one gets involved in such a challenge, one quickly notes how much
the various intellectual points of view are marked by generation-specific
experiences. Such diachronic focuses, however, unfold their
capacity only if the intrinsic dynamics of the discourses and their
interdependent interrelations are also examined, as Müller does. Thus
the dichotomies, the self-dynamics, and the mutual dependences of
the discourses are demonstrated in a post-structural interpretation of
the intrinsic dynamics of discourses. This does not mean, however,
that Müller is seduced by a ‘metaphysics of the discourses’. �or him,
and this is the strong point of his book, discourses unfold with a relative
autonomy whose structural-dynamic principle floats above the
actors while determining their actions. However, there are also actors
who are able to act clearly by themselves. Both factors in this complex
interplay are brought into relation by Müller in a differentiated way.
On the one hand there are significant actors, on the other there is the
quasi-independence of the discourses, and both are imbedded in a
historically evolutionary logic without straining the implied causality
too much. It is true that with regard to the most recent past, there
has been a lack of analyses of the German nationality discourse.
However, it would have been desirable in some places for Müller to
have illuminated the historical dimension of the positions he examines
on the question of the nation even more deeply. Many of the topics
Müller presents can be interpreted correctly only if the German
nationality discourses of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and those
of the German Kaiserreich of 1871, are included.
In order to interpret the orthodoxies and heterodoxies of the intellectual
arena, and to describe the structural and historical logic of the
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